You might best remember Bill Gates for his amazing chair leaping skills.
If not, maybe you know him as the founder of Microsoft a position which happens to have
made him the second richest person in the world.
And while some people have a lot of money, Gates' fortune is something else, sitting
at $103 billion as of 2019.
To get an idea of just how much money Gates has, Business Insider calculated that his
salary per second would be $380, pointing out that it literally wouldn't be worth his
time to pick up a $100 bill lying on the ground.
Using that figure, which was calculated based on how much his wealth increased between 2018
and 2019, Gates' salary would come out to about $1.37 million an hour, and about $32.8
million a day.
For further perspective, the same article states that the average American spending
one dollar would be the equivalent of Gates spending $1.06 million.
If he wrote you a million-dollar check it would feel like a collect phone call to him,
and he could write million-dollar checks every day for the next 285 years before running
out of money.
He could also give everyone in the world $10 and still have over $30 billion left over.
Don't get the wrong idea about Gates, though, because the guy is about as charitable as
the mega-rich can get.
He has donated over 27 percent of his net worth to The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,
which comes out to a total of about $35.8 billion.
That's more money than any human has ever donated to charity.
According to its website, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation focuses on:
"...improving people's health and giving them the chance to lift themselves out of hunger
and extreme poverty."
So how exactly is Gates working to improve health and decrease poverty around the world?
Well… with toilets.
According to the World Health Organization, around 2.3 billion people lack access to basic
sanitation and plumbing.
That's a lot of human waste that isn't being properly disposed of, and it can cause some
very serious issues contaminating soil and bodies of water which might be used for drinking
or bathing, which can spread all sorts of lethal diseases like dysentery and cholera.
It's a huge logistical problem, and obviously it's not very glamorous either.
"The waste here is not processed, it's still going to get out into the community.
They smell… terrible."
That's where Gates' foundation comes in.
So far he's invested $200 million and pledged another $200 million to help solve the problem,
while the charity has also worked to develop technology that could deliver sanitary waste
disposal to impoverished communities around the world.
Take the Nano Membrane Toilet for example, which is made possible by a $700,000 grant
from the Gates Foundation, and is currently being tested in Ghana.
In truly futuristic fashion, this toilet is able to treat human waste without external
energy or water.
Solid waste is separated, diced and incinerated, and liquid waste is purified into water than
can be used for crops.
Of course, Gates spends his money on more than just toilets.
The foundation has spent more than $2 billion on eradicating malaria, and around another
$100 million on attempting to get rid of polio and Ebola.
Then there's the $2.5 billion he and wife Melinda have given to the GAVI Alliance, which
works to improve access to vaccinations in the world's poorest countries.
Gates also has his own scholarship program, which has given away more than $1.6 billion
since 1999, has thrown another $100 million at malnutrition in Nigeria, and has even worked
to improve "time poverty", the idea that unpaid work robs people of their potential.
Last but not least, they launched The Giving Pledge in 2010, encouraging billionaires to
give away the majority of their fortunes.
Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and over 150 others have signed on, promising to pledge over half
a trillion dollars in donations by 2022.
Obviously nobody's perfect, and neither is Gates.
But given his huge fortune, he is on track to leave a truly meaningful legacy one that
won't soon be forgotten.
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